Turning deserts into flowers: settlement and poppy cultivation in southwest Afghanistan

Abstract

Supply-side interventions are often criticised for reducing illicit drug crop cultivation in one location only for it to rise in another: the balloon effect. The balloon effect is generally seen as an inevitable consequence of attempts to reduce opium and coca cultivation. In Afghanistan, there is little evidence of this causal relationship and limited acknowledgement of the socio-economic, political and environmental processes that govern access to the factors of production such as land and labour. This paper examines the settlement of former desert areas in southwestern Afghanistan. It shows how the encroachment on this land and the rapid expansion of opium production since 2003 were supported by affordable deep-well technology, collapsed controls on the use of what is officially government land and the relatively high price of opium that endured long after the demise of the Taliban prohibition of 2000–2001. Finally, it reveals that the rate of settlement of these areas was affected by an opium ban imposed across the Helmand Food Zone from 2008 to 2011 and shows how this drug control effort ultimately helped transform the province, bringing new land under permanent settlement and thereby increasing Helmand’s capacity to cultivate more opium poppy than ever before.

Keywords:

• Afghanistan
• livelihoods and sustainability
• fragile states
• conflict and security
• illicit economies
• balloon effect

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ann Bauxum for editorial inputs and to Jonathan Goodhand and John Collins for their comments.

Notes

1. Caulkins, Kulick and Kleiman, Drug Production and Trafficking; Reuter, “Production and Trafficking”; Thoumi, Illegal Drugs, 231–232.

2. Chouvy, A Typology, 16.

3. Chouvy, A Typology.

4. Ibid.

5. The academic literature on Afghanistan offers many examples of incorrect association between fluctuations in the reported number of hectares cultivated with opium and drug control efforts. The most obvious are the reports of the Taliban prohibiting opium in 1994 when they first swept to power in southern Afghanistan.

6. Mansfield, A State Built on Sand.

7. Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, “Farming Systems of Nad Ali District, Helmand Province,”

Agricultural Survey of Afghanistan, Report 15 (Peshawar: SCA, 1992), 1.

8. Macdonald, Drugs in Afghanistan, 59.

9. Goodhand, Contested Transitions.

10. Macdonald, Drugs in Afghanistan.

11. Mansfield, Failure of Quid Pro Quo.

12. Martin, An Intimate War.

13. United Nations Drug Control Programme, Strategic Study #1.

14. United States Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

15. United Nations Drug Control Programme, Strategic Study #1.

16. United Nations Drug Control Programme, Strategic Study #1; United Nations Drug Control Programme, Strategic Study #5.

17. United Nations Drug Control Programme, Strategic Study #1.

18. Ibid.

19. Byrd, Responding to Afghanistan, 17.

20. Mansfield, A State Built on Sand.

21. United Nations Drug Control Programme, Strategic Study #2.

22. Jelsma, Learning Lessons, 1.

23. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, The Opium Economy; Mansfield, What is Driving Opium.

24. Giustozzi, War and Peace, 9.

25. Mankin, Gaming the System.

26. Byrd and Jonglez, Afghanistan’s Drug Industry.

27. Buddenberg and Byrd, Afghanistan’s Drug Industry, 201.

28. Mansfield, Opium Poppy Cultivation in Nangahar.

29. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Opium Economy in Afghanistan; Mansfield, What is Driving Opium.

30. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/Ministry of Counter Narcotics, United Nations Afghanistan Opium Survey 2004.

31. Mansfield et al., Managing Concurrent and Repeated Risks.

32. Ibid., Mansfield and Pain, Counter-Narcotics in Afghanistan.

33. Mansfield and Pain, Counter-Narcotics in Afghanistan, 14.

34. Mansfield and Pain, Counter-Narcotics in Afghanistan; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/Ministry of Counter Narcotics, United Nations Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008, 2.

35. Goodhand, Contested Transitions.

36. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/Ministry of Counter Narcotics, United Nations Afghanistan Opium Survey 2014, 29.

37. Mansfield and Pain, Counter-Narcotics in Afghanistan; Mansfield, Resurgence and Reductions.

38. Mansfield, Central Helmand in 2011/12, 3.

39. This estimate is based on a population density of 0.9 persons per jerib of cultivated land.

40. Mansfield, From Bad They Made It Worse, 51.

41. Ibid., 79–83.

42. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/Ministry of Counter Narcotics, Afghanistan Drug Price Monitoring Monthly Report 2013, 3.

43. It is important to differentiate between the district of Bakwa in Farah Province and the area of Bakwa which encompasses the districts of Bakwa in Farah and Delarem in Nimroz.

44. This estimate is based on a population density of 0.51 persons per jerib of cultivated land (n = 170).

45. While none of those interviewed reported having their well paid for by the PRT, a member of the PRT reported in 2010 that the PRT 'could fund only 20 wells' and that 'farmers would be required to swear that they will not use the wells for opium production’ http://theafghanplan.blogspot.com/2010/08/dust-and-soil-bakwa.html

46. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/Ministry of Counter Narcotics, United Nations Afghanistan Opium Survey 2014, 21.

47. European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, EU Drug Markets Report, 26.